The amazing AWS re: Invent conference completed last night and I am on my way to Europe for a last visit to customers this year. I am carrying with me a more theoretical paper on the principles of distributed computing: Sparse Partitions by Awerbug and Peleg. It deals with the failure of control if networks grow larger and presents several solutions based on locality that have found practical applications.

Sparse Partition, Baruch Awerbuch and David Peleg, Proceedings of the 31st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), 503-513, October 1990.